Norway wins 2018 Winter Olympics

In a way, Norway’s win is hardly surprising: they finished fourth in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014, and had a hugely successful sporting year in 2017. They were crowned world’s sportiest nation after winning the Per Capita Cup, and finished a close second to the USA in GSN’s Snow & Ice sports ranking, their best-ever result.

It was an emphatic Olympic victory for the Scandinavians, with a 159-point margin over second-placed Germany. This is truly remarkable, considering that, in the last two editions of the Winter Olympics, twice-winners Canada’s margin was 8 points and 40 points respectively.

 

Norway built their success on strength-in-depth, scoring points in 10 of the 15 sports featured at the Games (though Germany with 13, the USA with 12 and Canada with 11 did better), and winning outright two sports: Cross Country Skiing (with a record 31.5% of points) and Ski Jumping. Crucially, they were also second in Alpine Skiing, Biathlon and Nordic Combined, and this was enough for them to eventually beat a very competitive German team.

 

Germany won four sports (Biathlon, Bobsleigh, Luge and Nordic Combined), the first nation to ever win four at the Winter Games in GSN history, and were runners-up in the Men’s Ice Hockey tournament. The latter was won by the so-called Olympic Athletes of Russia, as was Figure Skating. Altogether, the ‘non-doped’ Russian athletes finished a creditable fifth overall.

The shadow of Russian state-sponsored doping sadly still loomed over the PyeongChang Games, with two Russian athletes disqualified for doping offences. It’s a shadow that still hangs over the Sochi 2014 games too. Following the rulings in recent months by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the international Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), we decided to review the results of the Sochi games.

 

No easy task, as there are still appeals pending, and the decisions taken by the IOC and CAS are in some cases at odds. We settled for changing the results only for those cases on which a decision was reached and upheld by both the IOC and CAS: the two men’s Bobsleigh events, and the women’s Biathlon individual sprint and relay events. We removed the disqualified Russian athletes from the rankings and recalculated the first eight places in their absence, with the result that Canada finished first ahead of Russia in the Sochi games (see tables below), in a repeat of their victory in Vancouver 2010.

 

 

Back to PyeongChang, it’s worth celebrating first-time sport winners Great Britain, who topped the Skeleton ranking (see full list of sports below). Together with the country’s record medal haul, it’s an indication that the Winter Games, and Winter Sports in general, are definitely open to ‘newcomers’. This was also confirmed by the fact that the number of countries scoring points in PyeongChang was 33, one more than in Sochi and two more than Vancouver, with Israel scoring points for the first time in GSN Winter Olympics history (8^th in Figure Skating).

 

Finally, and although GSN is about nations, we would like to mention two amazing athletes whose performances made huge headlines in PyeongChang, and deservedly so: Marit Bjoergen, Norway’s Iron Lady, who added 6 medals (3 golds) to her extraordinary tally and, with 16 medals, has the largest medal haul in the Winter Games in history. And Ester Ledecka of the Czech Republic, incredibly the winner of gold medals in two different sports (Snowboarding Parallel Slalom and Alpine Skiing Super-G). An extraordinary feat, and only the third athlete ever to do so in a single edition of the games - the first since 1928, in an era in which specialisation is the name of the game.

 

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